WatDabney

There’s a new game in town, and it’s called “don’t even pretend that ethics matter any more because they don’t.”

The only rule is that you have to let Trump and his cronies get away with anything.

The reward is that Trump’s criminal “justice” system will let you get away with anything too.

And most of Washington is already playing.

The masks are coming off.

I’m proud to say that I’ve never once bought anything from Amazon. Long before Bezos started to reveal the depths of his psychopathy, the company just grossed me out. There’s something about businesses that are that large and that dominant that just makes my flesh crawl (the same reason I never shop at Walmart or eat at McDonald’s or get coffee at Starbucks or…)

But at this point, it goes way beyond that - Bezos, alongside Musk and Zuckerberg and Ramaswamy and Thiel and so on - is a direct threat to humanity. He and the other would-be oligarchs, under the umbrella of Trump’s ego, are deliberately setting out to destroy the ideals of liberty, democracy and justice in order to build an autocracy in which they will be the masters they believe themselves rightfully to be, and the rest of us will be relegated to being serfs, slaves or corpses.

Wat Dabney is a minor character in Terry Gilliam’s first non-Python movie, Jabberwocky.

The protagonist, Dennis (Michael Palin) goes to the city to make his fortune as a cooper. One of the first people he meets there is a legendary cooper named Wat Dabney (“the inventor of the inverted firkin”) who’s been reduced to begging because he’s not a member of the guild that controls the trade.

I first adopted the name on IMDb, back in the late 90s, but retired it when IMDb shut down their general interest forums, and didn’t use it on Reddit. I revived it for Lemmy.

A motivation that hasn’t been mentioned yet:

Every successful attempt so far by the US government to control what Americans may and may not access on the internet has been rooted in pre-existing legal restrictions on the content, or on access to it. It’s just been things like piracy, CSAM, drug trafficking and the like - things that are illegal in and of themselves, so banning sites that are involved with them has just been a response to thecrxisting illegality.

This is the first time that the US government has succeeded in banning a site without pointing to violations of any existing laws, but simply because they’ve decided to do so.

That’s a significant precedent, and to would-be tyrants, an extremely useful one.

Mm… there’s some merit to that I guess, but that’s expecting more integrity from a politician than is likely even possible. If he wasn’t an ego-driven opportunist, he wouldn’t have had a political career in the first place.

No - I still blame the DNC first and foremost. Biden’s unfitness wouldn’t have mattered if the DNC hadn’t cynically and self-servingly engineered his win.